


You Think My Heart Cannot Be Filled with Rage?

by theZanyArthropleura



Category: Overwatch (Video Game), Zoids (Anime & Toys)
Genre: F/F, Voluntary Kidnapping, Zoids AU, brief description of mechanical spideryness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:21:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25034632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theZanyArthropleura/pseuds/theZanyArthropleura
Summary: Satya's curiosity was only strengthening, well beyond any lingering sense of duty. “The terminal,” she indicated with a brief, stern gesture of her neck, her palm still steadily outstretched. “What were you doing?”“Hacking into the hangar’s containment protocols,” the woman answered plainly with another teasing smile, “and picking up anything else that might be useful, while I’m here.”“…And for what purpose are you here?” Satya asked, still unsure of what she was hoping to learn.The hacker arched a playful, boasting eyebrow.“I’m going to steal the Berserk Fury.”
Relationships: Sombra | Olivia Colomar/Satya "Symmetra" Vaswani
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	You Think My Heart Cannot Be Filled with Rage?

_“You’re closing in on the ridge, six hundred meters. Time to start keeping an eye out.”_

Winston’s deep, inquisitive, and slightly playful voice actually helped a bit at soothing Lena’s nerves. She’d flown before, sure, but the experimental systems on board the prototype Raynos whirred with unfamiliarity and filled the usually spacious canopy around her just enough that trying to pretend like this was any other battle wasn’t really an option anymore.

The orange-yellow-paneled flyer kept above cloud level, taking brief passes over the gaps so its pilot could scan the rock formations just below.

_“Now… do you see the sniper?”_

“Not yet…” Lena trailed off, doing a double-take as she caught a blurry flash of off-white mixed in with the browns and burnt-orange of the stone around it. “Wait… there!”

Tucked into a valley between two ridges was the lowered, tightly contorted form of the Cannon Spider that by now, half the Republic would give just about anything for a good shot at. The eight-legged machine was responsible for more than thirty direct kills on canopies and zoid cores alike, and Lena was still pretty sure she was the first person to ever get close enough to lay eyes on it.

“ _I have the data from your sensor array_ ,” Winston confirmed, with a building stress in his voice that Lena could predict from a mile away. “ _I’m relaying the coordinates, do not engage_.”

It was _right there_ …

With its bright red skeletal structure hidden by thick, off-white panels and tarantula-like leg coverings. With its thorax canopy and that weird, offset double-eye sensor thing between its fangs shining a deep green under the momentary window of open sunlight. With the dark grey abdomen-mounted gun emplacement rotating and firing off even more shots – three confirmed casualties already in _this_ engagement alone – until Lena could clearly see the gunner’s chair built into the weapon’s mounting frame along the left side.

The _empty_ gunner’s chair.

She was still in the middle of pondering the question, when the pterodactyl-shaped shadow of her Raynos passed directly over the Cannon Spider below.

_”Lena?”_

Still without a visible operator, the cannon turned quickly on its round base, aligning itself higher into the air. Lena evaded the first shot with a quick roll the side, the shell just missing the aerial zoid as it pierced the air only meters away in a path from wingtip to wingtip. Tugging fiercely at the controls as the cannon readjusted, Lena pulled the Raynos out to the right, putting another cloud between herself and the Cannon Spider only for a targeted, pursuing procession of rapidly-fired shells to punch upward through the mist in the pterosaur’s wake.

_“Lena! What’s going on?”_

“It still sees me! I don’t know what—”

Lena gained speed into a drifting curve, barrel-rolling out past the edge of the cloud until she was facing the Cannon Spider directly. She slammed her thumbs down on the triggers, the Raynos’s three-barreled chest cannon unloading a barrage of beam-fire. For a moment, it was almost as if the zoid was telling her exactly what to do, even with the added experimental systems tied into the mix.

The Cannon Spider brought up its front pair of legs, holding them close together and blocking the incoming fire with the breadth of the two limbs’ heavy paneling. The cannon realigned on a forward trajectory, the shell already leaving the chamber.

Lena activated the slipstream drive.

Blinking out of the path of the shot, the Raynos reappeared several dozen meters to the left, another burst of fire angling around the Cannon Spider’s defensive posture and striking the off-white plating of the thorax armor surrounding the canopy. The spider switched to the first and second leg on its right side, turret moving to match, but Lena had already blinked the Raynos farther out in the other direction, still on steady approach.

The cannon was faster this time, sacrificing accuracy for speed and firing immediately at the end of its rotation. Lena countered with a risky blink downward, the Raynos ducking under the shot with a cut-off mechanical screech and thankfully materializing entirely within a gap in the rocks below, a deep consistent cut that formed the long ridge-valley leading diagonally up to the spider’s position.

The Cannon Spider filled the air with shots even through the course of its weapon’s downward adjustment, enclosing the Raynos in the V-shaped rut in the rock. Now only a few dozen meters from course intercept, and with nowhere else to go before the line of fire descended, Lena blinked the zoid forward.

Forward, directly through the next shell fired, through the Cannon Spider itself and the cold, emotionless face of a pilot she would remember for a lifetime, through the whole of the rock formation behind, and through the boundary of reality itself.

  


* * *

  


“LENA!”

Winston watched the Raynos disappear completely from sensors, his wide eyes still in disbelief. Seconds ticked away even as the battle waged on outside, another voice though the comm system barely registering as the gorilla watched and waited for any sign of the zoid’s reappearance.

  


* * *

  


“I have the target in sight,” Ana reported with cool, professional composure, though shaken inside from having watched Lena’s zoid jump out of existence before her very eyes.

Still keeping watch from the opposite ridge, through the scope of her Gun Sniper’s tail cannon, she aligned the targeting reticule with the remaining zoid in her vision, and fired.

The Cannon Spider lowered itself on its legs at the last second, the shot striking diagonally across the roof of the canopy and filling the air with shattered fragments of green. The pilot was exposed, but not disabled, and the spider quickly rounded the cannon in retaliation.

Ana had the pilot at the center of her scope, finger on the trigger. It was a clean shot, and the enemy pilot’s remote control over the spider’s cannon had even momentarily failed, if the spark of electricity that coursed through her strange goggle array was any indication. Ana began to apply the pressure of her killing shot just as the faintly blue-tinged woman slammed at the goggles with frustration, the eye-covering panels briefly sliding open.

_…Amélie?_

  


* * *

  


From afar, Jack could only watch as the fired shell tore down the side of the Gun Sniper’s segmented tail, the initial explosion blowing the tan-and-blue zoid’s right leg clean off and setting off a chain of further, fiery detonations that finally consumed even the raptor-like machine’s head and canopy.

“ANA!”

As much as it pained him, there wasn’t time to reflect on another loss on a day already so full to the brim with them.

Talon was pulling an all-out assault on Overwatch’s last main stronghold, marching right down a bottleneck valley and overwhelming the Republic’s elite defense force with sheer numbers. Retaliation for the small strike team Gabriel had taken into their own territory, no doubt, but executed on a far, far grander scale.

Jack’s blue-plated Command Wolf fired several well-placed shots with its double-barreled cannon, three Talon troopers in their Helcats dropping limp to the ground, all while Reinhardt’s dull green Shield Liger leapt in to block both the last bursts of their fire, and the incoming barrage from a duo of Talon heavy assaults in their Dark Horns.

Reinhardt wasn’t even supposed to still _be_ here, but Jack wasn’t in the mood to complain.

“McCree! Find her!” Jack called out over comms, already knowing it was a moot and likely irresponsible order but failing to stop himself.

“On it, boss!” The young Guysak pilot drawled in reply over his zoid's speaker system.

The twin modified smoke canisters to either side of McCree’s desert tan, scorpion-like zoid popped open, the domed caps at either end giving way to a blinding flash of light that momentarily bewildered the four Helcats he’d found himself surrounded by. Jack turned to fire on the enemy zoids, gaining their attention even as the fading flare revealed an empty, if freshly disturbed stretch of ground between them.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack watched the burrowing zoid resurface at the edge of the canyon wall, disappearing again as it crawled into a hidden ridge leading up the mountainside.

A series of immense detonations rocked the battlefield, and Jack looked up in disbelief to find smoke billowing from the canyon-crossing, five-story building of the Overwatch stronghold.

Talon had been advancing steadily, but _this_ … this was something else, entirely.

Taking desperate hold of his zoid’s controls, Jack surged backward through the front lines, the Command Wolf leaping over a downed Dark Horn and physically knocking aside a Helcat that strayed too close.

The structure was crumbling on the inside, several sections in both the front and rear of the facility already caved in to the point of being open to the air above, and the explosions hadn’t stopped. Jack dodged falling sections of the upper floors as he pushed his way to the epicenter, catching sight of Torbjörn’s Killer Dome as it scuttled out of the rubble that had once been the engineering bay.

When he rounded the last corner, the first thing he took in was the containment field to the base’s power core, the energy barrier around the glowing reactor already damaged to the point of causing catastrophic failures throughout the rest of the building.

Standing off to the left of the room was the grey-plated form of Gabriel’s Command Wolf. Later, Jack would only remember that its cannons had been pointed toward the core.

“What’s going on?” Jack called out over speakers, walking his own wolf further into the room to assess the damage more fully. There was no response, and Gabe’s wolf didn’t move as Jack passed it by on his way toward the reactor.

Without warning, Jack’s wolf took two rapid hits to the left flank, the machine letting out a mechanical cry as its form was rocked and sent collapsing to the ground. _Total System Freeze_ appeared across Jack’s control panel, and from where his canopy had come to rest along the floor with the Command Wolf’s lifeless head, he watched as another barrage of two-patterned shots broke completely through the core’s defenses and turned the world an all-consuming white.

  


* * *

  


“Lena! Can you hear me?” Winston broadcast into the rocky terrain far above the quieting battle, the white-paneled Iron Kong bounding heavily across the more level portions of the ridge.

There was no longer any sign of Lena’s Raynos, nor even the Cannon Spider, but as Winston approached the scene of the battle, the active and strained sensor array mounted on the Kong’s back detected three additional zoid signatures closing in.

Leaping over the ridge out to the gorilla’s right, a Talon assassin’s Rev Raptor perched along the upper edge, balancing itself with a steadying swing of its serrated tail. The machine was plated in two shades of grey, and screeched in challenge as it threateningly displayed the bright red, axe-like claws on each of its hands.

Another leapt into position, then another, until the three had Winston enclosed in a flank at the bottom of the valley, the yellow eyes formed by their plate-divided canopies locked predatorily on the gorilla’s larger but supposedly slower zoid. The three surrounding machines deployed their pairs of side-mounted, sickle-like blades – also glowing an energetic bright red.

In the midst of pain and desperation, and feeling the anger surfacing, Winston stamped the Iron Kong’s left fist several times into the stone below, the forceful exertion drawing the Overwatch scientist back to a focused calm.

The first raptor charged, and Winston lowered the tesla cannon mounted on the Kong’s right shoulder, electricity surging through the attacking zoid and silencing its mechanical scream as it system-froze midair. Spinning by the sight of his sensor array, Winston backhanded the second raptor with the Kong’s left forearm, and elbowed swiftly into the third with a continuation of the motion that almost toppled his own machine.

Steadying, Winston reached out and caught the second Rev Raptor as it recovered and attempted to flee, a crushing right fist closing around its back-mounted blade system. The ensnared machine planted its hand-claws into the ground, crying out hauntingly with shaking twitches just as the third raptor attempted another leap.

Winston pulled back hard, tearing the blade system free, and swung the Iron Kong’s arm into an uppercut. The sickle-blade still protruding from the outward-facing side of his grasp struck through the other machine midair, impaling the assassin’s zoid from its ventral to dorsal armor and leaving it flailing atop Winston’s raised arm for several seconds prior to shutdown.

The last remaining, damaged Rev Raptor had broken out into a run, and though Winston grimaced with more threatening rage, he didn’t pursue. Dropping the impaled zoid roughly to the valley floor, he performed one last scan of the area before moving on.

She had to have ended up _somewhere_ …

  
  


  
**Six Years Later**  


  
  


The Berserk Fury.

Satya hated the name.

As far as she was concerned, the battle machines as a _whole_ carried with them a certain barbaric association, but to have such a thing be inseparable from her assigned partner via its designation was, the architech felt, entirely unnecessary. Surely, an _Ultimate X_ zoid, wired with an internal organoid system and capable of conscious thought on a level more advanced than all others, deserved a moniker more indicative of its high stature and intelligence?

She did, however, find the tyrannosaur zoid’s sleek, angular, monochrome white aesthetic – concealing a charcoal grey, red-capped understructure in a way that nearly set the zoid completely apart from the rest – to reflect far more pleasing an outcome than she could have hoped for, and that was without mentioning the cybernetic perfection of its advanced weapons array. Collectively, perhaps it was enough to balance out the machine’s more unsavory aspects.

After several unimpeded minutes of marching through the building’s wide transport hallways, both in and back out again, Calado’s security personnel finally appeared in the form of four black-plated, maroon-capped Zaber Fangs. Training their weapons on the Fury without so much as a verbal warning, the four tiger-like machines opened fire.

Swinging outward from their back-pointing stowed position, the Berserk Fury’s trifoil machine arms angled forward, both drills splitting outwardly as they spun until the foils had aligned on single rotational planes. Like a pair of forward-facing, three-bladed windmills held out to either side of the tyrannosaur, the trifoils generated a planar energy field that protected Satya and her powerful zoid from the incoming fire.

Narrowing the foils into three-pronged conical shapes, Satya channeled pixelated, light blue energy as a field of lightning that swept over the four attackers. The Zaber Fangs dropped to the ground undamaged, but plagued with total system freezes.

“ _Energy drain?_ ” Sanjay inquired over the comm line. “ _Why not terminate them?_ ” 

“You know I don’t kill if I don’t have to,” Satya explained, trying not to think about how troubling her mentor’s question should have seemed. “I’ll be gone before they can make repairs.”

Leaving the zoids sparking in her wake, Satya pushed the Fury onward, marching the therapod down the narrower hallway the four tigers had just spilled out from.

The moment she stepped outside, a deafening rumble sent her reeling, the Fury wavering on its feet from the shaking earth beneath it. Eyes widened, aghast, Satya took a turning step, her zoid’s short, segmented neck swinging its head around until the architech could see, both on-screen and through the narrowed, red-tinted eye-window of the modified canopy, the consuming fire rising from the Calado building’s collapsed wreckage.

“What…?” Satya asked blankly, struggling to fully process what her eyes were telling her as her thoughts raced to the most immediate, troubling worry. “The pilots… were inside…”

“ _Whatever do you mean?_ ” Sanjay’s voice acquiesced, in a way that only built the ominous groundwork of a road in Satya’s mind that she would rather not have followed.

“My Gods…” Satya exclaimed in a stunned near-whisper, as she watched even more flaming debris tumble in huge sections down the slope of the hill the facility had been built upon. Rolling, bounding, and spewing fire, the wreckage fell toward the arrangement of smaller buildings and structures positioned on the nearer side of the valley below.

“ _Calado won’t stand in the way of the good Vishkar will do for Planet Zi_.”

“Not Calado…” Satya formed the words in a dawning, racing panic, her heart pounding desperately in her chest. “River City!”

The thrusters positioned on the Fury’s back, mounted between the machine arms, roared to life, the arrangements of nested panels fanning upward like feathered sails. Leaping skyward by way of the recoil thrusters on its feet, the zoid arranged its lower limbs backward, and the four points of propulsion sent the machine on a rapid forward course, hovering several meters off the ground as it surged downhill toward the city below.

By the time the Fury landed, the fire had spread, the city cast alight in its orange glow. Spinning the trifoils in widened planes, Satya used a shield to block the collapse of a burning building to her right, holding back the falling debris until a group of civilians had fled from the structure’s shadow. Proceeding into an intersection, the structure at the corner directly to her left was crumbling too quickly for a shield, and Satya physically held the drill-like length of the closed left trifoil against the building’s second floor, allowing minimal debris to fall until all had again cleared.

Hearing faint screams ahead and to the right, Satya refocused, zooming in on the monitors to find an older woman futilely attempting to lift a section of metal support from a pile of debris. Satya noted the small shape pinned beneath the rubble, and closed in.

Working carefully, the architech guided the right machine arm into the piled debris at an angle, slipping the lowest of the three slightly-parted prongs beneath the support in a way that slightly raised the metal beam when she applied leverage. She held the unsteady position for long enough for the older woman to recover from her initial fear and recognize the chance to retrieve the child, wincing with a shudder as the burns across the young girl’s face became visible.

The two civilians had only just cleared the vicinity of Satya’s zoid, when the machine was rocked by a sudden impact, the whole of its bulk sent skidding several meters down the street as it struggled to remain standing. A rage-filled, battle-hardened cry of anguish pierced the air, at a volume that physically shattered the windows in the remaining buildings.

Vibrations ceased in the loudspeaker mounted on the chest of the second therapod machine, its own foot-mounted recoil thrusters now cooling from a rapid burst of cross-ground movement. 

Standing in the intersection where the Berserk Fury had been only moments before, was another of Vishkar’s own zoid designs. Stolen long ago, the Geno Saurer had by now been repainted in a dark blue color, a brighter green visible in the rare places where its vents and understructure showed through. Its narrow, silver-masked eyes, along with the small, angular surface vents on its arms and legs, glowed a fierce yellow. The zoid’s head lowered from its own, accompanying roar, mouth closing to hook the slight overbite of its angular nose over its lower jaw, yet also display an underbite of four sharp metal teeth filling the gap along either side.

Satya was long familiar with the stolen zoid’s pilot, and part of her was nearly tempted into a rage of her own, but not even Lúcio Correia Dos Santos could make her forget what she had done. What she was _responsible_ for, and desperate to do all she could to correct.

But Lúcio didn’t give her time to make that decision, the Geno Saurer’s recoil thrusters roaring again to life, leaving trails of green exhaust as the zoid skated on its feet to intercept. An upward, swinging headbutt caught the Berserk Fury across the throat as they both stumbled to a stop, the Geno Saurer’s jaws then clamping fiercely down on the Ultimate X’s armored neck.

“What the _fuck_ have you done this time, Vishkar?” Lúcio called out fiercely over his zoid’s standard speakers, a pair of heavy sickle-claws cutting deep into the Fury’s left shoulder. “You hadn’t already taken _enough_ from us?”

Satya swung the left machine arm upward, closed drill batting away the long, twin-barreled cannon mounted on the Geno Saurer’s back. One forceful swing of the Fury’s upper body freed its neck, and another slammed the damaged shoulder back into the Saurer’s chest, forcing the zoid backward.

“Stop this!” Satya broadcast from her own speakers. “We have to… we have to help!”

Three shots resounded from the smaller cannon mounted along the top of the Geno Saurer’s head, the blasts detonating against the Fury’s chest, neck, and shoulder. The Fury seemed ready to round for another attack, but Satya held the controls firm.

“YOU did this!” Lúcio bellowed in bleak anger, his zoid letting out a roar of agreement. “And now…”

He paused, seeming broken to tears of finality, even in his resolute, seething rage.

“…Y’all gonna pay.”

Recoil thrusters active again, the Geno Saurer swerved sharply to the left, rounding a wider arc through a swath of low, crumbling buildings and colliding with the Fury from the side. Satya’s zoid was launched to the edge of the street, flaming rubble from the bordering façade raining down on its dorsal plating at the rough impact. Lúcio lunged again, but the Fury roared challenge, right machine arm spinning a shield between them and rendering several furious claw-swipes futile.

With another human cry of rage booming from the chest-mounted speaker, synchronized with a saurian screech from its jaws, the Saurer backed away, haunches above head as it lowered its cannons forward and sent several powerful dual-shots into the barrier. Each strike weakened the shield, the Fury’s open jaws baring teeth as the zoid pulled itself free from the crumbling building and spun slowly on its feet to face the attacker.

“I won’t fight you,” Satya pleaded, feeling the unprompted shake in the controls beneath her hands even as she spoke the words.

“I don’t CARE!” Lúcio screamed, the final word resounding from the speaker as a sustained sonic attack against the shield.

Destabilized by the vibrations, the barrier shattered the moment the Geno Saurer leapt forward, fading fragments giving way to the pair of kicking, clawed feet that punched forcefully through to the armor paneling beyond.

Thrust backward all at once by the attack, the Berserk Fury let out a yelping screech as it was pushed past the breaking façade and tumbled into the burning building’s interior, the structure immediately experiencing total collapse and burying the Ultimate X in a mountain of rubble.

Shaken, but recovering from the fall, Satya glanced up through the translucent window portion of the canopy, finding her view obscured by a pile of wood boards stacked against the surface and slowly being consumed by traveling flame.

She hadn’t wanted any of this – but yet, it had happened. It was _real_ , and still happening around her, and it could no more be undone than those wood boards could be unburned – restored from charred, fragmenting ash to smooth perfection and yet, to the carefully assembled structure they had once been a part of.

And it was all Satya’s fault.

“Perhaps…” Satya mused in a faint, near-whisper, weakened and tired hands slipping from the Fury’s controls.

“Perhaps I should stay here.”

The burning rubble exploded around her in a flurry of ash and splintering wood set alight, whirring drills churning the toxic air as the rising Berserk Fury threw its neck to the sky and let out a metallic, saurian screech of challenge.

Having seemingly been watching the wreckage for movement, the Geno Saurer lurched backward in surprise at the display, but it was only seconds before Lúcio’s machine redoubled and charged once more, biting immediately for the Fury’s exposed neck.

Again without input from Satya, the Ultimate X swung its right drill across, roughly batting away the Geno Saurer’s head before adjusting to a parting, downward thrust and pinning the therapod’s neck to the street below in a three-pronged cage. Toppled to its side, Lúcio’s zoid turned its cannons upward toward the Fury’s left flank, but the Ultimate X widened the prongs of its left drill to parallel rails, the bright blue lance of a cutting beam leaving a burned path in the road below as it traveled over the double-cannon’s mounting point and severed the weapon entirely.

Satya pulled desperately back on the controls, attempting to rein in the renegade zoid, and in the moment’s hesitation, the Geno Saurer struck its claws just above the base of the parted right drill, slicing the weapon cleanly from its segmented machine arm.

If there had truly been any hope of regaining control of the Fury before, it was certainly lost to Satya now. With its head swung sharply forward in a terrible roar, the Ultimate X rotated the energized edges of its left drill to the outer faces, thrusting the spinning weapon forward in a strike that the rising Geno Saurer only managed to avoid by skating to the side on its recoil thrusters.

“Lúcio!” Satya called out frantically over the Fury’s external speakers. “Get out of here! The Fury isn’t responding, I can’t—"

A heavy claw swipe struck vertically down the right side of the Fury’s neck, digging clear through the paneling to the sparking understructure beneath.

“I ain’t hearin’ that noise… but I bet you can _hear this_!”

The Geno Saurer loosed a concussive wave of sound from its chest speaker, knocking the Fury into another stumble. Lúcio activated his recoil thrusters and charged, biting down on the Fury’s right shoulder just as the Fury did the same to the Saurer. The stolen zoid’s skates propelled the both of them into a spin, the two therapod machines completing several revolutions and gaining speed until the eventual release sent them both sliding backward on their feet in opposite directions.

The moment the Saurer skidded to a stop farther down the street, its foot-clamps hit the pavement.

The Fury activated its own clamps, the pair of thick, metal prongs lowering from their stowed positions in the lower segments of the therapod’s digitigrade legs, hinged at the foot and narrower end positioned like a spiked brace against the ground behind.

With a brief, skyward roar, the Geno Saurer swung its head upward only to lower back into a horizontal position, its entire body and tail aligning to parallel. The Berserk Fury did the same only a fraction of a second later, the two saurian machines mirroring each other with a distance of three city blocks between them.

Accordion-like exhaust vents opened from the top and bottom of each segment of the Saurer’s tail, the Fury’s bulkier outer armor panels hinging open like smaller, inverted sets of jaws so its own vents could do the same. Satya could only watch with widened eyes and bated breath as the two machines’ mouths opened wide, cannon-barrels sliding forward from within.

“Please…” Satya pleaded faintly, tiredly, through the Fury’s external speakers, though she was already sure no one would be listening. “I’m not doing this…”

Growing orbs of energy collected just in front of each barrel, both zoids’ ankle-mounted recoil thrusters powering up to perform their primary function. The Fury’s back thrusters fanned upward as well, preparing to provide additional counterbalance.

The two charged particle beams immediately overpowered the orange of the surrounding fire with their blinding, energetic blue glow, the flare-like welling of energy at the central point of collision shining like a miniature sun. For a moment, the two zoids were equally matched, the locked breams holding steady in a frozen stalemate that could shift at even the slightest of changing variables.

The Fury moved its remaining, left drill into play, a second charge of energy building between the widening, spinning prongs. Firing at a slightly inward angle, the foil sent an additional charged particle beam into the fray, connecting at the center point. The Fury’s dual beams began to slowly overpower the Geno Saurer’s single attack, pushing the central flare backward along the column on a gradual course toward the Saurer’s jaws… and toward Lúcio’s canopy.

A vent of energy erupted outward from the right side of the Berserk Fury’s neck, bursting though the deep, twin gashes the Geno Saurer’s claws had left in its understructure. Sent unstable, and moments from losing all function of its central mouth beam, the zoid swiftly ducked its head to the side, maneuvering the trifoil’s additional beam into parallel to take the place of the primary one.

Though the zoid effortlessly managed the switch, the maneuver had cost it the sustained force required even to maintain the stalemate, and seconds later, the central flare was finally pushed backward into the trifoil. The three prongs were propelled like splinters through the air as the explosive force obliterated the trifoil’s base, along with the majority of the machine arm behind it.

Lúcio released the Geno Saurer’s foot-clamps, and with the beam no longer firing, the zoid’s recoil thrusters continued into providing forward propulsion. Mid-charge, the enormous machine leapt off the road, skating a temporary purchase against one of the only still-intact buildings in the immediate vicinity.

In a propelled, inverting leap, the Saurer sheared into the still-recovering Fury, jaws hooking into the damaged neck plating and tearing free a larger section of the Ultimate X’s internal machinery. Spinning with the impact, the Fury struggled to remain standing as the Saurer landed directly behind it, spitting the torn metal from its jaws.

Feeling the Zoid’s power weakening, Satya took a forceful hold on the controls, and did the only thing she could.

She ran.

At the architech’s instruction, the Fury ducked to the right against Lúcio’s incoming, claw-swiping charge, leaping out of the open, burning street as the metal blades cut a downward swath through smoke-filled air. With all four thrusters activating, the Fury performed another leap that took it out over the city’s eponymous river, falling into a hover several meters over the parting waves as is surged out into the vast expanse that had kept the buildings on the other side free of the approaching flame.

  


* * *

  


Satya held her left hand aloft, a fissure opening in the palm. With the two sections of the prosthetic limb properly aligned, the three-bladed drill stored within the forearm slid upward, exposing the whole of the mechanism.

It was a miniature version of one of the Fury’s own trifoil armaments, and the device Satya had used to master the technology’s capabilities, in a training that extended beyond piloting the zoid itself.

Each blade was narrow, and nearly rectangular, but for the short diagonal cut at the very end. Presently, the three blades were aligned parallel, with their longest edges facing center. Those edges were made of a partly translucent material, capable of projecting, gathering, and relaying energy in numerous forms, but in the current blunt-edged drill formation, they remained inactive, with solid, non-edged metal running along the outer parts of the drill’s structure.

She was responsible. No matter how many ways she tried to shape the thought, no other explanation would take. She couldn’t _let_ any of them take. People had died in the explosion, died in the fire, and no doubt, others had died in the ensuing battle.

Satya rotated each blade on its own individual base, the blunt edges shifting inward while the energy blades shifted outward. This was the energized drill formation, the longer edges glowing blue and giving the spinning drill its cutting power. Due to the present arrangement, however, the drill now lacked a proper point, the end instead taking on the shape of an inverted cone.

Partly, it was the Fury of course. Its nature was uncontrolled, but who was at fault? There was no escaping her share of the responsibility. She’d allowed the circumstances to align, because how else would they have?

Manipulating the series of hinges at the base of each blade, Satya shifted those blades apart while allowing the ends of the blades to lean together, maintaining their proximity even while more space formed in the center of the structure. In the second energized drill formation, the parallel alignment was broken, the drill now resembling a large cone. Here, the diagonal edges at the blades’ tips were now parallel instead, neatly fitting together as the center of the new point.

She’d expected to be punished. Perhaps, even, to be forbidden from field operations, and she knew part of her had longed for that outcome. Such death and destruction… she could never be part of that again. It was something she needed to decide here and now, or was her soul not forfeit?

Next, the blades hinged outward without the other hinges returning to their former proximity, the main lengths of the blades again in parallel but now spaced farther apart. The individual blades rotated again to place the energized edges inward, those portions now functioning as energy-inducing rails for the cutting beam projector formation.

There had been no punishment from without. Sanjay had _commended_ her. Satya could hardly believe it, still had trouble accepting it, but to her handler, and possibly Vishkar as a whole, the events at River City had been a _successful demonstration_.

From the narrow beam projector, Satya now opened the trifoils to a wider inverted pyramid shape. The concave configurations had initially been largely a means of gathering ambient energy for the zoid’s charged particle cannon, but here, Satya had adapted the technology with the additional function of sapping energy from other zoids. At angles up to forty-five degrees, the spread of the gathering focus was ideal for setting a specific target or group of targets to be drained.

She couldn’t cast the blame wholly upon Vishkar; it was too easy, and would only be a denial of her own role in what had transpired. Still… to continue to allow such circumstances to pass, knowing what was now undeniable… _then_ , truly, the fault would be hers alone, would it not?

At wider angles, including the entirely flat plane that Satya now opened the miniature trifoil to resemble, the technology was more often used for projecting defensive barriers, of types ranging from a large, flat wall to a shielding dome capable of completely surrounding the Berserk Fury. Technically, shields could be projected from the trifoils in nearly any configuration, but Satya had found that the planar formation, spinning or otherwise, offered the most versatility, including for her own adapted capability of projecting barriers around or in relation to other targets besides the Berserk Fury itself.

What choice did she have? To the world, she was the perpetrator of horrid acts. Vishkar was the only home that had taken her then, and _surely_ they would be now. They had _made sure_ of it.

The miniaturized weapon spun again and again above Satya’s palm, energy cackling off the blue glow of the blades.

It wasn’t a favorable idea, but it wasn’t one to be avoided either. It would only be a matter of minutes before the guards knocked on her door, her escort to the day’s training session. She had little time to decide, for a question whose unthinkable answer could no longer be brushed aside.

Minutes passed, Satya’s nerves building as the charge of the energy weapon rose and fell. She would not deviate from her routine, from Vishkar’s will, out of fear if for no other reason, but still, she failed to find herself stowing the weapon away completely.

Then, it had not been minutes, but nearly an hour, and it was clear something else was very wrong.

Satya opened the door, finding the guards just outside – strewn across the hallway floor, with bullet holes in their foreheads.

Farther along, it was the same. The base’s personnel had been massacred by the dozens, and the trifoil still spinning in Satya’s hand had played no part in it. She followed the trail of bodies, until the direction of the path was clear as day.

In the hangar, the Berserk Fury lay dormant inside its metal containment frame, wires connected to points all along its body. The observation deck was equally silent, save for the sole figure standing amidst the corpses with her fingers tapping madly at the controls of one of the terminals.

The screen was one facing away from the door, so when the purple-haired woman looked up from her misdeed, her eyes locked directly with Satya’s.

…then froze, along with the rest of her, as she took in the three-pronged, draining-configuration rotating weapon that was now angled in her direction. When targeted to a human, the miniature trifoil could produce effects ranging from drowsiness to unconsciousness, and whether the woman knew that or not, she seemed to treat the new threat with the appropriate reverence, her gloved hands slowly taking their place in the air.

“You killed these men?” Satya accused, with only the slightest note of curiosity, as she looked over the strangeness of the intruder. The left side of the woman’s head was shaved and augmented, instead, with two strips of metal running in arches over her ear, and the dull purple cybernetics had been flickering with magenta light patterns in time with the former movements of her fingers.

“They blew up half a city first,” the woman chided with a darkly amused, half-accusing smirk. “I just repaid them in kind.”

At that, Satya felt a pang of guilt that nearly broke her concentration, but her curiosity was only strengthening, well beyond any lingering sense of duty. “The terminal,” she indicated with a brief, stern gesture of her neck, her palm still steadily outstretched. “What were you doing?”

“Hacking into the hangar’s containment protocols,” the woman answered plainly with another teasing smile, “and picking up anything else that might be useful, while I’m here.”

“…And for what purpose are you here?” Satya asked, still unsure of what she was hoping to learn.

The hacker arched a playful, boasting eyebrow. “I’m going to steal the Berserk Fury.”

Satya stared dumbly for a moment, before it became almost undoubtably clear from the woman’s silence that she was _serious_.

_…Oh. Well… I suppose it will have to do._

“I am the zoid’s pilot,” Satya began, still keeping her weapon trained on the other woman. “The _only_ one it will accept. Whatever purpose you intended for the machine, you will require my presence, if you wish to ensure its cooperation.”

The other woman stared blankly, then skeptically, for several long moments, the only sound the light, whirring hum and faint crackle of the spinning, energy-building trifoil.

“ _Amiga_ … are you negotiating _up_?”

Satya felt it when her nerves made her falter, but redoubled with stern insistence. “You will take me with you. It is _required_.”

“Look…” The hacker was growing rather uncomfortable, it seemed. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, _amiga_ , but pilot or not, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to manage on my own. So, if you’ll excuse me…”

“I am Satya Vaswani,” Satya nearly yelled, forcefully tensing and thrusting forward her prosthetic as if to remind the intruder of its presence. She gestured a nod toward the monitor. “Check the records you were accessing, you’ll have all you need to know.”

Hesitantly, and keeping watch as if to make clear on the offer, the now much more cautious intruder returned her hands to the keyboard, her implants reactivating and her smirk partially returning as she fell again into what was evidently, her element.

Satya had, initially, the distinct sense that she was merely being humored, but what she could see, without a doubt, was the exact moment the other woman’s expression changed entirely.

Gone was any trace of that casual, dark smirk, or even any of her growing hesitance. _Mortified_ , was the word Satya would have used, for the brief moment before it was replaced again with a humorless, chilling picture of complete irrefutability.

A silenced machine-pistol was drawn and aimed at Satya’s forehead in the space of a single, faltering moment, cold eyes staring piercingly into her own.

“You’re coming with me.”

Satya lowered her weapon, retracting the blades into her forearm. “Very well,” she agreed with a brief nod and a faint, but irrelevant note of confusion.

Right hand still holding her pistol firmly, the hacker brought her left index finger to her ear. “Change of plans. Gonna need you to bring around the tortoise,” she declared over what appeared to be some sort of comm system. “I’m Sombra, by the way,” she continued for Satya’s benefit, with just the slightest air of her former casual tone seeping back into her words.

“How were you planning on extracting the zoid?” Satya questioned evenly, her gaze drifting past Sombra, through the observation window behind her, and toward the now-fully-repaired machine’s prison in the hangar below

“It’s going to go berserk again, like it did before,” Sombra answered with a light shrug.

Satya felt her stomach twist. “How do you know?”

“Because I’m going to tell it to,” said Sombra, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “It’s an Ultimate X. It has an integrated organoid system, right?”

Still confused, Satya nodded slowly.

“ _Well_ …” Sombra drew out suspense with a smile, before tapping knowingly at the implants running along the side of her head.

“…so do I.”

  


* * *

  


Satya watched with fascination as purple circuit lines appeared over the surface of the Berserk Fury’s armor, beginning near its feet and rising several stories to its head before fading entirely. “Fury’s on board,” Sombra confirmed, stepping back through the gaps in the metal cage and dropping to the floor. “Gonna give us a few minutes to get out first, though. Follow me.”

Satya fell into step close behind as the hacker made for one of the exits. “You can make it do all of that?”

“I didn’t _make_ it do anything,” Sombra countered. Most zoids, sure, I can take them over easily. But with an Ultimate X, it’s more like… a conversation. Equal playing field, I just have to figure out what it wants.”

Satya was yet again struck curious. “And what does the Berserk Fury want?”

“…Tell you later, this is your stop.”

The double-doors slid open, Sombra gesturing grandly out into the jungle beyond. Through the dense plant growth, Satya had to look closely for several seconds before she caught sight of the dark, midnight green metallic form several meters past the treeline – the bulky shell of a Cannon Tortoise, with its rear hatch opened like a stubby ramp.

Sombra walked with her out into the trees, helping her to the edge of the ramp that didn’t quite reach the ground. When Satya turned back around, however, the hacker was already cutting a path directed along the side of the base wall.

As the hatch door closed and Satya strapped herself into the makeshift seating along the right side of the storage space, she struggled to identify the sinking feeling that hit her like an unwelcome weight. Despite the stated nature of the circumstances she’d so boldly thrown herself into, she’d instinctively felt _safer_ around Sombra, for reasons her mind was still struggling to make sense of.

“You alright back there? Ready to move out?”

Satya heard the voice both through the speakers in the compartment and reverberating throughout the zoid’s internal machinery – clearly, the pilot. Though lightly accented in a way distinct from the hacker’s, the character of this second voice was of the same cheery, good-natured sort that Sombra’s seemed to hold more often than not.

“Y-yes,” Satya cautiously replied. “Everything is… alright.”

“Glad to hear it. Just sit tight, and statistically speaking, we’ll be out of here in no time. I’m Baptiste, by the way.”

Satya heard the zoid’s motors roar to life, the chassis rising, lowering, and angling in time with the Cannon Tortoise’s steady walk on stubby legs. “Thank you, Baptiste.”

“Oh?” Baptiste exclaimed, with seemingly genuine surprise and gratitude, along with a subtle hint of vindication. “You’re welcome!”

In addition to the window placed in the center of the rear panel – evidently a similar material to the zoid’s canopy, only tinted to a darker color – several viewscreens now activated within the space, including both ahead views from the tortoise itself and longer-distance views from some other angle Sombra and Baptiste were apparently using to view the activity at the Vishkar base. On one of the latter, Satya watched the now very rampant Berserk Fury close the prongs of its left drill around the neck of a construction Brachios, thrashing the smaller zoid about like a flail and using it to knock aside several white-plated Zaber Fangs that had responded to the breakout.

The pleasant accommodations, and now, this offered context for the larger operation, were all rather strange for a captive to be given access to. Again unsure how to make sense of it all, Satya fell into silent observation of the jungle trees filling in from the sides of the viewing window as the plodding-along tortoise zoid left them behind.

There was a flash of red from the trees, a warped, reverberating sound like a firing energy weapon, and a Rev Raptor stood in the retreating jungle where only empty air had been moments before.

Satya’s eyes widened and her ears burned as the machine let out a wailing, skyward shriek. That Zoid was a _Vishkar_ design, but the coloration…

All dark, slightly bluish shades of grey, with lighter portions on the torso, arms, and head. Bright red from chin to eyeline, red caps, and an eerie red glow from its claws, blades, and the narrow slots of eye-like canopy windows below its shallow-domed, gunmetal headplate.

“Why is _Talon_ using Rev Raptors?”

As she uttered the words, the zoid charged, mechanical rotations to Satya’s right and left signaling the targeting of the Cannon Tortoise’s auto-cannons. Beam fire poured forth from either side of the viewing window, the tortoise lowering on its feet and slowly turning its shelled torso when the raptor appeared to _teleport_ several dozen meters to the side.

“Talon’s had these since the end of the war,” Baptiste answered, the tortoise speeding up to a stunted scamper. “I guess your protected technology wasn’t as protected as you thought.”

Cutting a zig-zagged path through the trees, leaving severed trunks and trails of red light in its wake, the Rev Raptor dodged the tortoise’s fire and closed the distance, its curved sickle-blades deployed behind a horizontally-aligned neck and a toothed maw that let out a constant, ear-splitting screech. It was over in seconds, the agile machine closing in for the kill.

For a moment, the space behind it flickered, a static-like purple glow distorting the air before yet another shape appeared from nowhere.

Decloaking through its midair strike, the dark grey of the Helcat was still difficult to parse in the jungle’s shade, but the standard red coloration of the zoid’s legs, neck and tail joints, sensor unit, and weapon mounts had been replaced with a dark, but vibrant purple. Its caps were lavender, the thin visor line running around its opaque canopy was a neon pink, and a fiery pink-purple glow was currently venting from several ports along its forward pair of limbs.

Satya noticed, then, that the standard single-block foot design of the zoid’s paws had been replaced with the four narrow claws typical of the larger feline types such as the Liger line, and that on the outstretched front feet, those claws were furiously aglow with more of the same violet light.

Striking past the Rev Raptor with a cutting slash-line trailing from its right paw, the Helcat landed on its feet just as the stumbling raptor’s severed head was launched somersaulting forward from the force of the energized laser claw attack. The tips of still-glowing sickle blades dug into the ground as the Talon zoid’s body skidded to a stop in the rich jungle soil.

“That should be the last of them,” Sombra’s voice now issued from the speaker, her zoid falling into smooth, catlike step behind and slightly to the left of the advancing tortoise. “Looks like we weren’t as careful as we thought.”

The hacker’s words sounded slightly annoyed, but moderately nonchalant, her tone softening seconds later in a noticeable shift.

“How you holding up in there?”

It was a rather embarrassingly long time before Satya processed that the question had most likely been directed at _her_ , and even then, her reply was offered with a wince of anticipatory guilt. “I am… alright so far, if that was…”

“We’re getting close now,” Baptiste picked up through the growing silence Satya hadn’t quite intended to fill. “Almost out of here.”

On the screens, it became apparent that the tortoise was approaching a Gustav, the isopod-like workhorse transport hidden away in a clearing just ahead. The segmented panels of its arching roof were cast in what looked to be a light, greyish blue with white accent lines, the sensor unit mounted at the top suggesting a secondary color of desert sand camouflage. While the second transport pad in its coupler-connected train was the standard flatbed, the first carriage was an enclosed rectangular hangar space, the now surprisingly docile Berserk Fury visible as it calmly took its place inside and vanished beyond the closing rear double-doors.

The Cannon Tortoise stepped slowly up to the second carriage, taking an unassuming place in the center while Sombra’s Helcat crowded itself horizontally in the space remaining behind it. The cat then activated its stealth shield, leaving a transport pad that would appear, from the outside, to only be carrying the tortoise.

Still observing the monitors, Satya watched while Baptiste – a dark-skinned man dressed in teal combat attire with an orange over-shoulder sash – leapt quickly from the tortoise’s canopy and made for the small door in the lower left corner of the first carriage’s back wall. He’d apparently made his way to the Gustav’s controls, as the transport started moving moments later, continuing the journey through the dense jungle still ahead.

“We’ll settle in once we're clear of the tree cover,” Baptiste spoke through the speaker system. “Until then, you’d best remain where you are. Anything trying to hide itself nearby would show up on the Gustav scanners, but _someone_ won’t let us take chances like that.”

“ _Hey_ ,” Sombra countered with mild offense, “just because we have the best tech _I know about_ doesn’t mean it’s the best tech out there.”

“You’re really underselling yourself, you know.” Baptiste’s voice carried the tone of a teasing smile, as always. “You sure you want to do that in front of our new passenger?”

“Eh, I’m sure it won’t drop my average much. I _am_ pretty great.”

“At everything except humility, it seems.”

“Says who?” Sombra voiced a scowl. “Hey, Satya! I’m _plenty_ humble, isn’t that right?”

Satya was taken aback for several quiet moments, but considered uncertainly. “I… do not think so, no… as per my observations.”

Baptiste had built to a hearty chuckle at the words, Sombra half-groaning, half-sighing in reply.

“Damn. And I was going to let you stay in _my_ room, _amiga_.”

“You joke,” Baptiste answered as he slowly regained composure, “but the Gustav’s short on living space as it is.”

“Who said I was joking?”

There was a small, confused part of Satya’s mind that wondered why she wasn’t worrying more at what was being said, but truthfully, she couldn’t help but smile at the others’ teasing banter. Sombra’s and Baptiste’s personalities were a rather dramatic change of pace from anyone the architect had had the displeasure of knowing at Vishkar. They both were… bright, and lively. Exceptionally so, and yet, laden with strange notes of indulgence and morbidity that did surprisingly little to detract from the welcoming nature of their amiability.

“I will, of course, reside wherever I am instructed to,” Satya cut in on the dawning silence, again having to remind herself of the original nature of the bartered agreement.”

The others remained quiet for several moments longer, and Satya felt a familiar twinge of regretful nervousness crawl down her spine.

“Sooo… just so you know…” Sombra finally began again, her cautious and worried voice bringing Satya to both relief and newly welling concern, “…you’re not _actually_ a prisoner. You _asked_ to be here, and you are. We’ll have some stuff to work out, sure, but you’ll never not have a say in things.”

Satya distinctly remembered that _something_ had changed, in the end. Sombra’s final word on the subject had certainly felt like a command, and one separate from any sense of agreement the two of them might have managed from what had occurred prior. There seemed to be little point in arguing the matter, however, at least for the time being.

“I understand,” Satya offered in reply – though, despite her words, there was a part of her that wondered, after a lifetime of apparent manipulation at Vishkar’s hands, whether she truly did.

  


* * *

  


The edge of the jungle was a wide gap in a sandstone ridge, the highest rocks cutting a harsh V-shape down to a flattened path running between. Beyond was a shallow hill slope descending to the desert below, but the moment the view resolved fully on the wall monitor, it was obscured again by a cloud of dark smoke filling the entirety of the rocky gateway to the lands ahead.

“Stay quiet,” Baptiste ordered coolly as the Gustav pulled to a quick stop, its trailers only halfway past the treeline.

A darker silhouette appeared within the smoke, the obscuring cloud seemingly generated from six ports on the neck and forelegs of the machine stepping forward. The vents closed suddenly as the canid zoid cleared the smoke, its gold-accented black armor gleaming in the setting sun.

A Shadow Fox.

“…I’ll handle it,” Sombra spoke in a hushed, only halfway-confident tone of pseudo-worry. The bare-toothed grimace of the Shadow Fox’s narrowed face remained unresponsive, even while the hacker’s Helcat decloaked in its position on the rear trailer, leapt to the ground again, and sauntered semi-casually around the transport’s left side.

Whether the two pilots were communicating over the battle net, or exterior speakers, Satya couldn’t hear what either said to the other as the two zoids stared each other down. Eventually, however, the Shadow Fox lowered its head in a seeming grumble, turned tail, and retreated slowly back into the smoke. The dark cloud dissipated moments later, revealing only the unobscured path beyond.

The Gustav started up again, proceeding slowly past Sombra’s zoid until it was properly aligned for the smaller machine to leap back into its former place behind the Cannon Tortoise. Whatever type of encounter had just been avoided, the others said nothing as the parted ridge wall rose behind them and the vast stretches of desert sand burned red in the final moments before the sun passed below the horizon.

**Author's Note:**

> I had plans to make this a full series at some point, but as of now it's on the "we'll see" pile for when I'm looking for a new, lengthy project.


End file.
